Now, when women log on to TexasWomensHealth.org in search of a doctor, they’re directed to call a 1-800 number so that an operator can help them find one, a method that one HHSC employee testified in court has been completely effective.

“We’ve been able to find every single woman who calls a provider,” testified Michelle Harper, a policy advisor at the HHSC, during a January 11th hearing regarding Planned Parenthood’s most recent lawsuit filed over its exclusion from the new Texas Women’s Health Program. Texas state court judge Stephen Yelonosky ruled that day that, while he believes injury is being done to Texans who are no longer able to receive WHP care from Planned Parenthood, he could not grant the provider a temporary injunction that would allow it to remain in the program because of the low likelihood that Planned Parenthood would succeed at trial in the future.

Harper testified that she did not know how many women had called the hotline seeking references, only that she knew that providers had been found for all of the callers. She testified that the failings of the online search function—which turned up, among others, doctors that did not provide family planning services, ambulatory surgery centers, and doctors not even enrolled to be WHP providers in the first place—were due to the fact that the HHSC “ended up being over-inclusive.”

RH Reality Check twice investigated the HHSC’s provider search, first in May 2012 and then again in September 2012, with remarkably similar results, alerting the HHSC to problems with the search function both times. And both times, RH Reality Check was told by HHSC press representatives that the department was working on fixing the system.

When reporters at the Dallas Morning Newsfound the same problems with the site earlier this month, the HHSC finally disabled the search function and told the Dallas paper on Tuesday that it is “working on the website look up list to make it more useful for women searching for a new provider.” A spokesperson said last Tuesday that a new list will be up within the week.

If the HHSC has had the ability to fix its WHP provider listings in a matter of few days, why didn’t it do so when it first became aware of the problem eight or more months ago?

Are the long-standing issues with the web search indicative of real-world issues with the number and nature of health care providers in the WHP? Certainly the HHSC itself would say no. Based on the results of its own survey, the HHSC has said that there are more than enough doctors and clinics enrolled in the Texas WHP to meet demand, even without Planned Parenthood’s participation.

In her letter, Farrar writes that she doesn’t “anticipate any delay in releasing this information” to her office. Since the HHSC now says it can fix in under a week what it hasn’t addressed over a period of months, that should be no problem at all.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission has said that it will have absolutely no trouble managing the number of clients in its new Texas Women's Health Program, according to the department's own survey. According to everyone else? Not so much.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) claims that, according to its own research, there will be plenty of doctors available to serve clients in the newly implemented Texas Women’s Health Program (TWHP) without Planned Parenthood. The new TWHP launched January 1, and Planned Parenthood has been banned from participation in the program because the state considers it an abortion provider “affiliate.”

“Overall, the Texas Women’s Health Program patient capacity survey results are positive. In most areas, the survey found that the state has the capacity to serve even more women in 2013.”

The department estimates that its providers can see 147,513 clients this year—and it’s truly an estimate, given that 56 percent of the providers HHSC ostensibly surveyed did not even respond to the actual survey. For the providers that didn’t respond, HHSC guessed how many additional clients clinics and doctors might be able to see in 2013, based on how many clients they billed for 2012. HHSC surveyed providers within 30 miles of Planned Parenthood clinics that can no longer see the 50,000 or so Texans who’ve relied on them for contraception and cancer screening services in the past.

For example: providers within 30 miles of Harlingen, on Texas’ Gulf Coast are projected to increase their capacity by 9,158 clients. And HHSC projects that providers in San Antonio will be able to increase capacity by a whopping 28,214 clients. The department also found that capacity will be “especially robust” in the Rio Grande Valley, one of state’s poorest-served areas in terms of health care, which has taken drastic hits already as a result of 2011 cuts to family planning services in the state.

HHSC Executive Commissioner Kyle Janek—a man who doesn’t believe the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimate that more than a quarter of Texans are uninsured—said in a statement on Monday that the survey “gives us great confidence that we can continue to provide women with family planning and preventive care and fully comply with state law.”